#OTD in 1845 – The arrival of the potato blight in Ireland is reported in the Dublin Evening Post.

To this day, all over Ireland the landscape bears mute testimony to the events that occurred in the horrific period from 1845–1850. Starvation graveyards offer silent tribute to the millions of Irish men,women,and children buried in unmarked mass graves. Thriving villages were replaced by heaps of moss-covered stones. Although historians have not agreed on the numbers who perished, most estimates range between one and three million.

The Great Hunger began in September 1845 as leaves on potato plants suddenly turned black and curled, then rotted, seemingly the result of a fog that had wafted across the fields of Ireland. Phytophthora infestans, the fungus that invades the potato plant and causes its rapid decay, struck for the first time in the eastern United States in the summer of 1843. The invisible fungus spores were transported to Belgium in a cargo of apparently healthy potatoes, and in the summer of 1845 the…